Author Ralph Tharayil on ‘rolling back the mountains’

Author Ralph Tharayil was in India in September 2024 as part of the “Long Night of LiteratureS” – a festival of literatures in the European languages. As part of the tour, Ralph visited Kolkata, New Delhi, and Varanasi, showcasing his novel, “Nimm die Alpen weg” (Roll Back the Mountains). Pro Helvetia spoke with him about his writing and debut novel.

Tell us about your journey as an author.

My journey has been quite a twisted path. I started writing young, though I didn’t realize it as “writing” then—it was more a yearning to belong to language.

I have folders on my laptop from 15 years ago: novel idea one, novel idea two. I never realised them, which may have been a necessary practice run.

Then I moved to Germany 11 years ago and have been in Berlin for seven. That’s when things clicked. I met people that I didn’t know existed – who became friends and partners. I’d always thought of writing as solitary work—and it is—but you also need people to lift you up. Now, I do reading tours and theatrical tours and performing literature has become part of my life.

My book “Nimm die Alpen weg” was published last year in Berlin, and I’ve done over 60 readings with it. It’s been a great ride.

You mentioned writing as a way to engage with language. Can you tell us about your relationship with languages?

My relationship with language is layered. I grew up speaking Malayalam, as my parents are from Kerala, but I was raised in Switzerland, learning Swiss-German and later Standard German in school. It was through literature—reading German texts by Max Frisch, Franz Kafka—that I first felt the power of storytelling.

Eventually, I expanded to Indian authors like Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri, who helped me approach my “Indianness” from a distance. I wanted language to feel like home, but now German has also become my prison, that I built myself syntactically, semantically, culturally. Writing is a way of rearranging that prison.

How does novelistic storytelling interplay with verse in your work?

There’s a tradition of epic poetry in both India and Europe—the “Mahabharata” or “The Iliad”—where the epic (‘epos’) works as a song. My book isn’t epic; it’s just a small fragment. But what influenced me is the relationship of speech, of narration and how—with the form of poetry or of broken syntax—I can cause a moment of disruption or silence that the text needs in order to breathe.

Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia—a space that’s both within and outside society—deeply influenced me. Heterotopias like airports, graveyards, or psychiatric wards are liminal spaces. I wanted the family in “Nimm die Alpen weg” to feel like a heterotopia—an immigrant or refugee family embodying that liminality. So, I needed to write in a way that makes the text itself a liminal space. That’s why I’m always intrigued by poetry in prose, because it allows one to suspend certain things, for instance, meaning.

Was it challenging to write about being Malayali in Switzerland?

There’s no established narrative about Malayalis in Europe, especially in German-speaking regions. Reinventing a story that hasn’t existed publicly is a challenge—almost like breaking something that isn’t yet built. Maybe that’s why some people were irritated by the way the book presents itself and the story unfolds. In the German-speaking world, calling it a “novel” feels daring, but I think it’s valid.

This is your first tour in India. How does it feel to be here, “back,” but not quite back?

I wouldn’t call it “back” because I never had a place to start with here. India is vast, and each time has been different. I’d only been to Delhi once before, without chauffeurs or embassy stays. I was moving around by auto-rickshaw, experiencing a different India.

On this tour, I spoke to students at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and Jadavpur University in Kolkata. It’s beautiful to see how they connect with the book and to have Indian readers studying it in German.

Why did you call your book “Nimm die Alpen weg” (Roll Back the Mountains)?

When you’re looking for a title, you want something that resonates—maybe something provocative, anything but boring. This title was there from the beginning. It was originally a poem title, and even after I scrapped the poem, the title remained. It guided me as I wrote, almost like a North Star. Starting with the title first was a reverse process, but it stuck, and people loved it.